Dundee Contemporary Arts forms a major part of the re-establishment of the cultural identity of the City of Dundee. It has succeeded in making a public arts venue which is inclusive and enticing and encourages interaction between the public and many forms of visual arts. To quote the Sunday Times (7th March 1999) "It is one of the most satisfying, sublime and stylish public buildings opened in years". To date it is the largest and most complex project that the practice has completed.
The practice won the project competition in July 1996. From the outset the aim of our scheme was to group all activities; galleries, cinemas, printworkshops, shop and research facilities, around a central social space and cafe. The building partially reuses the brick warehouse of the former Macleans garage and forms an 'L' shaped plan on a site which falls 3 storeys from front to back. The cafe and foyer sit at the internal corner of this 'L' and are therefore at the heart of the building in plan and section.
The site has a very narrow street frontage between the Roman Catholic Cathedral and the Georgian house of the Clydesdale Bank. In order to draw visitors into the building we aligned the foyer on the Tay Street opposite so that it might form an extension of that public realm into the building; we set the entrance back below a dramatic canopy and beside the shop (the commercial face of the arts activities within) to give a breathing space to the street edge and a presence to the approach, and finally we made use of continuous rooflights to cast sunlight and shadow across the internal walls of the foyer drawing the eye to the furthest part of the plan.
This theme of the use of light is continued by the use of windows to give glimpses of the Tay estuary to the south and also between foyer and cafe and galleries and cinemas. The aim is to entice the visitor to see an exhibition or a film when they might have come only for a coffee, to draw them in without their feeling the need to specifically come for a show, and to help everyone understand where they are in the building and where everything else is. Even the main cinema has a large window below the screen allowing the audience to be connected to Dundee before and after the film and allow the external world a glimpse of the interior at the same time. This is part of the idea of the building as part of the city as a whole. Everything is visible from either the internal street or the cafe/bar. The street is supported by the necessary ancillary facilities and behind the scenes by a double height office space.
Adjacent to the cafe and visible from it is the world of the printmakers, placed there as an enticement to participate whilst beneath is the two storey "engine room" of the university facilities grouped around a double height experimental gallery.
Finally the language of the building grows out of the idea of inserting the new facilities within the eroded shell of the former brick warehouse. New building slips past the old in a series of planar elements of copper glass and steel. These planes then become a language of the new wing beneath a single unifying roof profile and are repeated in sliding doors and walls internally.
Since its official opening in March 1999 the building has been a phenomenal success attracting more than three times the number of visitors expected.
